A cold war in a hotter world: Canada's intelligence sector confronts climate change

Since its birth during the Cold War, Canada's spy agency has occupied itself with three primary threats: terrorism, espionage and foreign interference in domestic politics and business.

Now, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service is pointing to a disruptive new player on the field: climate change.

CSIS says it's trying to get a handle on how climate change will disrupt national security. It has even acknowledged that effort publicly — something intelligence agencies rarely do.

"This is something that will absolutely have profound impacts on Canadians and it will have impacts on our national security. I think it's important that we are going to be in that space," Tricia Geddes, deputy director for policy at CSIS, told an intelligence conference last month.

"I obviously think this is another one of those big shifts that's obviously been happening for a long time, that we're on the watch for, and I think there will be a significant contribution from the service." 

Vincent Rigby, who was until recently Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's national security adviser, said climate change is a cumulative threat. A single mudslide doesn't make a national security crisis — but floods and slides increasing in severity over time due to the warming climate could threaten the security of the entire country.

"[Extreme weather events are] becoming not just more widespread, but the impact is quite, quite, quite damaging and quite, quite, quite severe. That does start to have national security implications," he said.

"It's a threat to our economy. It's a threat to our social fabric to a certain extent, and it's a threat to how we deploy our resources."

Climate change is also likely to drive geopolitical instability and mass migration.

This fall, the U.S. government warned that tens of millions of people are likely to be displaced by 2050 because of climate change — roughly 143 million people in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America alone.

"As time goes on, you'll see greater disagreements, greater conflicts, potentially over water resources, for example," said Rigby, now a senior fellow with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"We're already seeing that in countries like Ethiopia and Egypt, that are having disagreements. But this could get even worse, I think, as we head into the future."

There are dangers in the Arctic as well, he said, with geopolitical rivals seeking to control the region's resources as the ice retreats. Russia's reactivation of its northern Cold War-era bases, coupled with China's clear interest in the region, could be creating the conditions for great power confrontation.

In March 2020, the Russians deployed three ultra-quiet nuclear subs to simultaneously break through the Arctic ice at the same location — a demonstration that set the defence community on edge.